A watchdog whitewashed its oversight of FEMA’s disaster response

After catastrophic floodwaters submerged wide stretches of southern Louisiana in 2016, displaced homeowners and officials criticized the federal recovery effort as dangerously slow, leaving thousands of people homeless for months.

The watchdog concluded that FEMA’s response in Louisiana, where 13 people died in the disaster, was a huge success, a “remarkable,” “resilient and mission focused” effort that “provided hope and a way forward” for flooded communities. Under pressure from Congress, the inspector general in 2017 retracted and purged from its website the Louisiana flooding report and retracted a dozen other audits.